Avaddon is a financially motivated ransomware group that emerged in early 2021, conducting targeted attacks primarily against organizations in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Australia. The group operated as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, recruiting affiliates to conduct attacks while the core operators maintained the ransomware infrastructure and negotiated with victims. Avaddon employed double extortion tactics, exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their encryption payload and threatening to publish stolen information on their leak site if ransom demands were not met. The group typically gained initial access through phishing emails, exploited vulnerabilities in remote access services, and used legitimate administrative tools to move laterally within compromised networks. Over its operational period, Avaddon targeted critical infrastructure sectors including energy, government, finance, manufacturing, and transportation, successfully compromising at least 146 documented victims. The group's activities were significantly disrupted in June 2021 when the operators voluntarily shut down their operations and provided decryption keys for all victims to law enforcement, making Avaddon one of the few ransomware groups to cease operations without direct law enforcement takedown action. The group has been linked to 146 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on February 1, 2021; most recent post September 9, 2021. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Avaddon means Vistex appeared on a ransomware extortion site and data attributed to it has been published. If this is your organisation, or a supplier you depend on, the priority is to confirm the intrusion and contain it before the window to act closes.
- Engage your incident-response team and preserve forensic evidence before remediating — do not wipe affected systems first.
- Force a password reset and revoke active sessions for exposed accounts; rotate any credentials, API keys or certificates that may have been in the stolen data.
- Assess regulatory notification duties (GDPR, NIS2, sector regulators) — many carry a 72-hour reporting clock from awareness.
- Monitor for the data appearing on Avaddon's leak site and across paste and breach channels, and brief downstream partners who may be exposed through you.
How we know this. Darkfield monitors public ransomware leak sites continuously, archiving every new disclosure and the data later released against the victim. Each entry on this page is sourced from the operator's own publication and cross-checked against complementary OSINT feeds (RansomLook, ransomware.live, RansomWatch). We do not collect or host stolen data — only the metadata, timestamps and screenshots needed to make the public disclosure searchable and accountable. Records here are corrected when the original post is edited, retracted, or merged with another disclosure.
